Buried Lies

by Kristina Ohlsson

  ‘Perhaps she wasn’t the one who took him,’ I said.

  Lucy lowered the sheet she was reading and looked at me in surprise.

  ‘So who was it, then?’

  ‘I don’t know. All I know is that I can’t get this story to fit together. Nothing makes sense.’

  I couldn’t escape the similarities I had seen earlier with the client I had visited in prison, the one whose sister with learning disabilities had been threatened by the real perpetrator. I thought through it all again.

  Why would anyone accept responsibility for a crime they hadn’t committed?

  Because they were being threatened, or to protect someone they loved.

  Perhaps not just loved, but someone they also felt a degree of responsibility towards. Non-negotiable loyalty. The sort you might have with a brother or sister. Or, even more so, with your own offspring.

  ‘She accepted responsibility for the murders to protect her son,’ I said slowly. ‘Then she escaped for the same reason.’

  ‘To protect Mio?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘From what, or whom?’

  ‘From whoever it was who was threatening to harm the boy.’

  Lucy shook her head.

  ‘That doesn’t make sense, Martin. It just doesn’t.’

  She tossed her papers down and turned towards me. I interrupted her before she had time to start.

  ‘The police in Texas contacted their colleagues in Sweden and asked them to take her in for questioning,’ I said. ‘This they did, and – as we both agree – the first interview is different in every respect from those that followed. When they picked Sara up two weeks later, all of a sudden she’s a different person. She gives up and serves the police what they want on a silver platter. What could explain such a complete transformation? Why didn’t she confess during the first interview?’

  ‘Because she thought she could get away with it,’ Lucy said. ‘The weight of evidence was completely different the second time they took her in.’

  ‘Yes, and how come? Well, because Sara herself had emailed the police in Texas and told them where to find the weapon used in the Galveston murder. Now why the hell would she do that? Why not just tell the whole story to the police in Stockholm?’

  ‘Because she thought she could stick it out? And when she realised she couldn’t, she shopped herself in an anonymous email. You’ve got to stop pretending this woman was normal. She murdered five people. End of story.’

  I felt so restless I had to stand up. I went over to the open window and breathed in the fresh, cool air.

  ‘There’s another explanation,’ I persisted. ‘That during the first interview she didn’t have a clue about any of the murders. Once the police started sniffing about, the real perpetrator got worried. In all likelihood someone who was already in Sara’s immediate vicinity. He – or she – paid Sara a visit and frightened her into confessing not only to the murders in Texas, but also the three in Stockholm.’

  ‘I’m just wondering who this person is,’ Lucy said. ‘Someone so powerful that Sara didn’t think there was any point going to the police for help. I mean, think about what was at stake here. Five cases of premeditated murder. It would have been decades before she got out.’

  ‘Maybe she panicked,’ I said. ‘Maybe she would have tried to escape even if her dad hadn’t got ill. Don’t forget, she escaped through a fifth-floor window. If you do that, you’re desperate.’

  ‘Or cold.’

  ‘Or both. Either way, she made her way to her son’s preschool and tried to save him.’

  The window blew open and almost knocked a plant over. I put the pot on the floor and opened the window wide.

  ‘But she didn’t save him, did she? In all probability she killed him.’

  ‘We don’t know the slightest thing about that,’ I said. ‘Anyway, what if the threat against the boy was so terrible that killing him felt like a mercy?’

  I didn’t honestly believe that myself, but it was the only thing I could think of.

  ‘Unless you were right when you said that someone else took Mio,’ Lucy said. ‘Maybe she was working with someone.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said.

  I’m really shit at guessing games. I did my best to stick to the facts, but it still went wrong. Sara escaped at two o’clock in the afternoon. Six hours later she was dead. The boy disappeared from preschool at four o’clock. What could she have done with him in such a short space of time?

  ‘The murders,’ Lucy said. ‘Let’s concentrate on the murders instead. We’re not getting anywhere with the rest of it.’

  She started to sort the documents on my desk.

  ‘I need a whisky,’ I said. ‘Shall I get you one as well?’

  The first murder was committed in Galveston during the autumn of 2007. Galveston is a dump in the south of Texas, a seaside resort on the Gulf of Mexico. Once upon a time it was the largest city in Texas, a place where a lot of migrants settled. Then a hurricane struck and destroyed the whole city, and it never really recovered.

  Shit happens.

  The victim’s name was Jane Becker, and she worked at the Carlton Hotel down by the beach. The family for whom Sara Tell was an au pair used to stay in that particular hotel when they visited Galveston for weekends or during the holidays. Sara was with them on several visits. The police investigation conducted when Jane Becker died discovered that she had been selling sex to guests at the hotel outside her working hours. Persistent rumours in Houston suggested that Sara Tell made extra money the same way, both in Houston and Galveston. There was, however, no evidence to support the claim.

  One theory was that Jane was murdered because she realised that Sara was competing for clients and threatened to expose her to her host family. Another was that the murder was an accident, that Sara killed her by chance. Sara herself refused to talk about the motive. Either way, the murder was described as brutal. The victim was stabbed more than ten times in the chest.

  The second murder took place in Houston in the spring of 2008. A taxi driver was beaten to death with a golf club that had been in the back of his car. Sara was seen getting out of his car outside a nightclub, yelling ‘Fucking pig!’. An hour later he was dead. The police were working on the theory that Sara was molested in the car and then went to find the driver to take her revenge. The man was found dead beside his car. The boot was open, which at first led the police to suspect he was the victim of a robbery. But they never identified a suspect and the investigation was going nowhere until they caught sight of Sara.

  ‘I don’t see how they ended up investigating Sara,’ Lucy said.

  ‘Coincidence,’ I said, seeing as I had recently found the answer to that question in the background information relating to the request sent from the police in Texas to their counterparts in Stockholm. A detective who was working in Galveston at the time of the first murder moved to Houston in February 2012. At that time the murder of the taxi driver was still an open case, even if it was pretty cold. The detective’s first task was to shake some life into it. Someone had taken a picture of Sara as she got out of the taxi in front of the nightclub, and that picture had been sitting among the rest of the material relating to the case. Sara had never contacted the police herself, but the detective recognised her from a previous occasion. Lucy looked at me.

  ‘What previous occasion was that, then? How the hell could he have recognised her in 2012? That was several years after she left the US.’

  I read the document again. I couldn’t actually understand the notes.

  The detective who had moved from Galveston to Houston claimed he recognised Sara from another murder investigation.

  Slowly my pulse started to speed up.

  ‘Hang on a moment,’ I said.

  Lucy tried to take the document from me, but I clung onto the desiccated sheet of paper tightly.

  ‘He recognised her from the investigation into the hotel murder in Galveston,’ I said. ‘After all, Sara had stayed at that ho
tel several times. And the victim was murdered in the backyard of the hotel.’

  ‘So? What difference did that make? Did the police talk to everyone who’d ever set foot in that particular hotel?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Of course they didn’t. But there was indisputable evidence that Sara really was in Galveston when the first murder was committed.’

  ‘Shit!’

  It was as if someone had burst a large balloon in the room, then walked out. A balloon which had belonged to me, and which I was far too fond of.

  Furious, I threw the document down.

  Evidently that train ticket Bobby had given me was the joke of the century. Unless the police in Galveston had made up the fact that they questioned Sara in connection to the murder there, and I thought we could safely rule that out.

  She had been there.

  Sara had been at the hotel in Galveston when the first murder was committed. And not on a train heading towards San Antonio.

  ‘Okay, I think we drop this now,’ Lucy said when I didn’t say anything for a while. ‘Or do you want to try some more angles first? Maybe talk to Sara’s sister?’

  ‘No, definitely not. No point.’

  I could feel anger throbbing inside me. Bloody hell. I’d discussed the train ticket with both Eivor and Didrik, and they just let me go on. Would it have done any harm to say, nice and quietly, ‘Look, just let that go. There’s evidence that proves where Sara was when the murder was committed’?

  ‘But they did,’ Lucy retorted when I tried to explain why I was so angry, even if I was probably more embarrassed. ‘Both of them tried to get you to understand that there was evidence – genuine evidence – but you didn’t listen.’

  I read through the account of the Texas police again, but it was impossible to reach any other conclusion than the one I’d already come to.

  The detective had recognised her.

  Because she had featured in another murder investigation, in Galveston.

  How he was able to remember and recognise her several years later was beyond me, but on the other hand that wasn’t my problem. Maybe he’d taken a liking to her, had a bit of a crush on her.

  It didn’t matter.

  The train ticket was worthless, and I felt like I’d made a right fool of myself. Didrik and Eivor had punished my naivety by letting me pointlessly work my way through an entire police investigation.

  ‘But we’ve still got the diary,’ Lucy said, in an obvious attempt to console me. ‘And Gustavsson’s list of things that he wasn’t sure about.’

  But that sort of talk wasn’t going to wash with me. I had to accept facts: there was no great miscarriage of justice to uncover. Sara Tell had confessed to five murders, and she had done so emphatically. What difference did a few unclear details make? Taken as a whole, the evidence against Sara was so overwhelming that any objections to her confession felt pathetic.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ I said. ‘Okay, that’s enough. We’ll get rid of these boxes of material tomorrow, and in less than two weeks from now you and I can piss off to Nice.’

  My career as the representative of the dead was over before it began. Sara Texas’s whispers from beyond the grave had fallen silent.

  Or so I thought.

  PART III

  ‘Do you believe me now?’

  TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW WITH MARTIN BENNER (MB).

  INTERVIEWER: FREDRIK OHLANDER (FO), freelance journalist.

  LOCATION:

  Room 714, Grand Hôtel, Stockholm.

  FO: Okay. So you had a chance to back out?

  MB: Yes, and I didn’t take it. Well, I’m not sure it was that much of a chance, really – I was already lost. The case died that afternoon, right in front of my eyes. The train ticket was a bluff, and everything else collapsed along with it.

  FO: But that was fairly predictable, wasn’t it? I mean, the train ticket was just a false trail, a diversion.

  MB: You might think so. If it weren’t for the fact that a conclusion of that sort breaks rule number one in this case. Which is that nothing was what it seemed at first.

  FO: Oh, so the ticket turned out to be of some use to you after all?

  MB: We haven’t got to that part yet. One thing at a time.

  FO: Wasn’t it annoying that Lucy thought differently to you all the way through?

  MB: I don’t really understand the question. That was – is – the basis of our collaboration. That we’re so different, and can therefore act as the perfect sparring partner for each other.

  FO: For an outsider it’s kind of difficult to understand your relationship. It seems to be, or at least have been, fairly turbulent?

  MB: Only when we were in a relationship, and when we broke up. Since then the nature of our friendship has been very clear.

  FO: You’re allowed to be with whoever you want, while she stays at home waiting for you?

  MB: If that’s your summary of what I’ve told you so far, then you’re a very poor listener. Lucy’s my equal. She can sleep with whoever she wants to. If she wants to.

  FO: Of course. Sorry, I’ve said several stupid things in a row now.

  MB (Sighs): I’m not sure there’s any need for you to apologise. On some level I realise that what Lucy and I had must have looked like a peculiar relationship to other people. And it didn’t get any less strange during the course of the summer.

  FO: What about Nice? It doesn’t really feel like that holiday ever actually happened, or did it?

  MB: No, it didn’t.

  FO: I see. So you stayed at home instead?

  (Silence)

  MB: Not exactly. Because one day the office doorbell rang again, and then everything started up again.

  18

  They say persistence is a virtue, but I’ve always doubted that. The world is full of good characteristics for a person to have, but persistence? No, I don’t think so. Most people around me know that about me, and respect it. Not Belle, though. With the straightforwardness of a four-year-old she keeps trying to get my attention, and doesn’t realise that she’s playing with fire when she asks the same question over and over again, or breaks the same rule time and time again. That was one of the things I had to work hardest at when she first came to live with me. Not to give in to the urge to open the window and chuck her out when she became too much of a nuisance.

  After we discovered that the train ticket wasn’t the exciting piece of the puzzle that I’d been trying to turn it into, we didn’t talk much about Sara Texas. Someone more zealous than me would probably have rowed to shore seeing as he was already sitting in the boat, but that’s not my style. Nothing is more important to success than choosing your battles.

  In fact, everything returned to normal as early as the following day. Lucy and I resumed our aimless wait for our holiday, and could barely summon up the enthusiasm to answer the phone. Lucy went on talking about which sun-cream she was going to take to Nice, with me only half-listening. Later I called Veronica, the woman I’d met at the Press Club.

  ‘Would you like to meet up again? I could come round to yours with a bottle of wine and some different cheeses?’ I said.

  ‘That would be great. I’d love to see you again!’ she said.

  Just a little too enthusiastic. What I lack in patience I compensate for by being a mean strategist. After decades as an addict of the sort of kick that only really good sex can give you, I’d developed my dating technique to perfection. It’s all about fucking with style. A lot of women can envisage having no-strings sex with a guy – more than once, even – but not if he treats them like shit. That ought to be obvious, really, but a lot of guys make the mistake of thinking that if they show respect for the woman they want, she’ll think the relationship is serious and get upset – and become a problem – when she realises that this isn’t the case. But that rarely happens to me now. I was extremely confident that it wasn’t going to happen with Veronica.

  Veronica wanted to see me on Friday, but obviously that
was impossible because Belle and I always have our cosy evening together then.

  ‘How about Saturday?’

  ‘Thursday,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow.’

  Partly because I didn’t want to have to wait, and partly because she wasn’t worth a Saturday evening. Lucy might want to do something then.

  I barely had time to put the phone down before the door of my office was thrown open. Lucy was standing in the doorway dressed in just her bikini.

  ‘If you can’t be bothered to care about my sun-cream, maybe you’d care to think about what I should wear?’

  How many times can a man get turned on by the same woman? It’s questions like that that keep me awake at night.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said hoarsely.

  ‘Oh, Martin,’ she said.

  Yep, everything was back to normal. Lucy and I played silly games and made paper aeroplanes out of old case notes. I carefully put the material from the preliminary investigation into Sara Texas’s case back in its boxes and carried them down into the basement. I’d drive the whole lot to the tip another day, but at that moment, with the disappointment still fresh, I just wanted it out of the flat.

  I managed to do just one sensible thing during the days that followed, and that was to reassure myself that things were going okay for my client, the one in prison who was worried about his sister Maja. His so-called friend was taken into custody both for the assault and for making unlawful threats, and my client was allowed to go home. Without anyone asking me, or expecting me to be there, I sat in on the meetings my client had with the police about the future protection of his family. The police conducted a thorough investigation of the friend’s network, and concluded that the level of threat faced by my client and his sister could only be regarded as low.

  ‘Only as long as he’s locked up,’ my client said.

  The police had a plan for that too. Supplementary measures would be put in place when the piece of shit got out. For my part, I felt relieved. As did my client, eventually.

  Everything was nice and peaceful. Sometimes we even got a hint of sun between the showers. We had so little to do in the office that I let Belle stay and play there two afternoons in a row when she should really have been at preschool.